Billy Merrit 3/6/06

Billy Merritt is a long-time teacher and performer at the UCB. He's been doing improv in New York for as long as just about anyone beside his Swarm and Stepfathers teammate Michael Delaney. He is probably as responsible for helping to build the NYC long-form community as anyone else.



Josh: Where are you from?


Billy: Originally?



J: Yeah.


B: Gainesville, Florida.



J: Is that a big city?


B: It’s a college town. I was a University brat instead of an Army brat. My Mother and Stepfather worked for the University of Miami, so we lived in Miami until I was in 6th grade. In 6th grade we moved up to U of Florida, which is in Gainesville.



J: Did they teach at the University?


B: My Stepfather did. He was an Oceanographic Engineer down in Miami and switched to just computers up in Gainesville. He eventually became the Dean of a section of the college of Computer Engineering at the University of Tennessee.



J: What was it like growing up with him? Was he a big academic presence?


B: No, actually he was a country bumpkin. You know, simple. I mean he was an Oceanographic Engineer, then he worked at a thing called Iphus [sp?], which is the largest farm college in Florida, where he handled the computers. So he’s always been …like a country bumpkin.



J: A country bumpkin who’s amazing with computers.


B: Yeah, like a …country nerd. Let’s put it that way.



J: What was the earliest influence on your sense of humor?


B: When I was a real little kid, real little, I watched PBS. This was back before there was satellite or Cable. And PBS had Monty Python on it. So, I watched a lot of Monty Python and Benny Hill, and of course Second City whenever that came on. SNL whenever that came on like everyone else. I was in the ‘Saturday Night Club’ [at school]. The next week we would all reenact the sketches [from the previous SNL]. Everybody would do the Wild and Crazy guy and stuff, that’s how long ago it was.



J: This was in High School?


B: This was in Middle School, a long time ago.



J: So, you were performing even in Middle School then?


B: Well, we were performing to each other as kids. I mean, I didn’t get on stage until High School maybe, in my senior play.



J: When did you first know you wanted to be a performer?


B: I took a 10 year break between High School senior play and getting back into it again. I was a very bad football player for a while, then I got into the wonderful world of restaurant management and did that. I didn’t get back into theater, I didn’t even know that I was going to do comedy, until 10 years after all that stuff. I’d say my twenties, my mid to late twenties, I got back into it.



J: How did you get back into it?


B: It’s weird. The company I was working with sent me to West Palm Beach. And in the middle of that they just decided ‘eh we’re not going to do franchises anymore,’ and I was a franchise manager. I had gone down to West Palm to work on opening a location. I was supposed to be down there for three months, and in that time the owner who was kind of a faux hippie said ‘eh, this isn’t cool. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And he just quit doing franchises, so I was just kind of stuck down there.

It was like I could go back to Gainesville or stay down there. So I stayed down there and started bartending, and got into the, what is it? The ‘Miami Vice’ style of bartending. It was nice. Bars on the water and boats and all that stuff, but after a while you start to get burned out on it. So I started going back to school. And the exact thing that started getting me back into theater was …food.



J: Really?


B: Yes, because I went back to Palm Beach Community College, and was going for Political Science for some reason and I saw this big building and figured that had to be the cafeteria, because I was hungry. …I was hungry.



J: [Laughs] Got it.


B: So I went over there, looking for the cafeteria, because it was a brand new looking building, and it turned out to be the theater.



J: The same thing happened to Nipsy Russel.


B: Are you kidding?



J: Yes.


B: Ok, because Nipsy and I very similar. I went in looking for food and some guy put a paint brush in my hand and said ‘start painting’ a set. And of course I just ate it [mimes eating the paint brush]. Delicious.

And the amazing thing about this school that I went to is the Duncan theater. It’s a very advanced theater. They put a lot of money into it. Burt Reynolds himself put in three million dollars for this theater. They were going put the Florida ballet in there, and the palm beach opera was going to play there. …Palm Beach and West Palm Beach has a lot of ‘old money,’ and they spend a lot of money on the arts. It’s like an inordinate amount of money, so this place has like a ten million dollar theater for community college students. And the teachers there had been teaching there for over 30 years, so they were really good teachers. And that’s where I met the person who influenced me the most, Frank Lahey. And that’s how I met Michael Delaney, because he was in that school too. And Dave Blumenfeld, also from the Swarm. We all met at that theater. …Frank Leahy was known for discovering Burt Reynolds,



J: Really?


B: Yup, and “discovering” George Hamilton, discovering Judge Reinhold. That’s some of the great actors of our time.



J: Right.


B: So it was pretty cool. We were really lucky to have a tight knit community. And I would say that those two years where I got into acting was what sealed it [for me wanting to become a performer.] …And this theater is about the size of some of the main houses on Broadway. It seats about 750 people. And it sells out because they’re all …“blue hairs,” who’ve got nothing else to do, but sit around and watch plays. We did ‘Rags,’ ‘Gemini,’‘the Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ And that’s the play that got us into improvisation, the musical, ‘the Mystery of Edwin Drood.’



J: How did that get you into improvisation?


B: The play is a murder mystery written by Rupert Holmes where the audience decides who does it by the end, so there’s a lot of improvisation involved. And the director, Frank Leahy, had us play Victorian Vaudeville actors playing Dickensonian characters. …It’s like an English accent on top of an English accent. We’d have to go out and talk to the audience fifteen minutes before the play as these English people. A lot of the elders thought that we actually were English.

The great thing about that area is that it’s a great incubator for actors, because you have built in audiences. No matter how old they may be, they’re still going to be there. They still like theater, but you have to do the classics. When I was down there, you could do this role in ‘My Fair Lady,’ this role in ‘West Side Story’ and have a career, if you just keep doing them over and over.



J: Did you know that you and Mike Delaney and Dave Blumenfeld were going to work together for a long time?


B: No, well, we started down there doing a show late Sunday nights at 11 o’clock at night at this little place called the Art Spark. Delaney had also seen Second City and probably knew more about improv than any of us, as far as improv games and stuff. So we got this spot and we said ‘well, let’s go up and do it.’ A couple other players, friends of ours hooked up with us, and we actually became a group called the ‘The Comedy Squad.’ And that was the true training for comedy for us. Because we didn’t have anybody to study with for improv, we just had to learn on our own.

We did some horrible improv. We did a lot of sketch. We’d write sketches every week, so we were very prolific. I’d say there was a year, a year and a half where we’d just write new stuff every week. And audiences kept coming. It became a big fish in a small pond kind of thing. Delaney moved up here first, because his now wife Linda moved up here. She was a ‘real’ actress. She came up here to work at the to join the Neighborhood Playhouse. Delaney followed her up here, and we followed him up here. Because the question was were we going to go to Chicago or go to New York.



J: The decision to go to Chicago would have been based on improv?


B: We had an ‘in’ in New York, meaning a place to live, a place to stay until we found a place to live, and National Improv Theater was up here. And in the 80’s that was a fairly decent-sized improv theater.



J: So, actually what year is this?


B: Uhh.



J: If you don’t mind saying.


B: I can’t remember.



J: Was it in the 80’s?


B: No, they were big in the 80’s. We didn’t come up here until, I want to say 93 or 94. The early 90’s. I’m really bad with dates. Grunge was big. ‘Jeremy.’ ‘Jeremy Farted’ was a big song.



J: I don’t think that’s a real song.


B: What is it? ‘Jeremy spo-oke in class…,’ that’s when we moved up here. It was the waning years of National Improv Theater, and they were looking for anybody and everybody. And that was our first honest teaching in improv. A lot of the stuff we already knew. We had studied all the books. We had taken acting classes, so we knew how to act and stuff like that, but …they were good. There were some really good teachers at National Improv Theater: Chris Smith, Jim Meskeman is still probably one of the best improvisational actors I’ve ever seen. You see him all the time in little bit parts.

They had a really unique system of improv, because all theaters have a system or technique, so everybody can latch on to one thing and know ‘that’s how we do scenes.’. At UCB it’s ‘the game.’ National Improv Theater had this nice little space. It’s not there anymore. It’s where the Gristede’s is on 8th and 22nd.



J: That’s really nearby [the UCBT is on 26th and 8th].


B: Yeah, it’s all in the same area. Improv has only been in the Chelsea area of New York.

As it turns out they were Scientologists. And they had developed Scientology. Well, Scientology had developed within the theater. When it started, they weren’t into Scientology, I believe, but eventually each and every member became a Scientologist. So a lot of money got funneled out of the theater. And the theater grew big in the 80’s, because there was the whole boom. They got a lot of money from Wall Street, people just donating money to them. And they were big with Stand-ups. Stand-up was big at the time. So they always made a big deal about, Jerry Seinfeld taking classes there when he was starting up. Rita Rudner started classes there. Griffin Dunn started classes there. A lot of actors in New York at that time. Giovanni Rivocese, he was taking classes at the time. Delaney knew him, I think. Leo Allen was there.



J: Doing stand-up or improv?


B: I think he was taking improv classes, but he was always doing stand-up.

But jumping back, this is important lore, improv lore. National Improv Theater was started by Tamra Wilcox. Tamra Wilcox was a large woman. She had some sort of disease or something where she just kept gaining weight, so she was sickly, but she was very smart, and she really knew her shit. She was on the Committee with Del Close back in San Franscisco back in the Hippie days. And she and a bunch of other people in the Committee did the Robert Altman movie ‘M.A.S.H.’ You can see Tamra Wilcox as one of the cheerleaders in ‘M.A.S.H.’ She always used to say ‘that’s what I used to look like.’

And she used to pontificate on the theory of improv forever. Just really good stuff. And not to jump on anyone’s religion, but Scientology took over the whole theater and how it was run. And in my opinion kind of ran it into the ground. A lot of those guys moved to L.A. Of course in the celebrity center, for Scientology in L.A. And I believe the UCB is near them.



J: Did they ever try to recruit you?


B: Oh sure. Every day. It was just weird little things. They’d give you pamphlets and things. And once they realized it’s not going to happen, they’d go ‘ok, great.’ And they might be a little resentful. And we might be a little freaked out by them or something, but there were no spaceships in the basement or anything.



J: What were some of Tamra’s philosophies and how did they influence you?


B: The main thing I got out of them is that you don’t know who you are until your scene partner tells you who you are. That’s how they taught it. So you have no idea. You have an idea for your scene partner and he has or she has an idea for you. That’s how their level 1 and 2 started. Obviously, as you get more developed like all rules they start to slack up a bit. That helped me with not driving scenes as much. And not to be funny. And not to tell jokes. Because when you go out and come in with an idea, you’re going to tell a joke. But if somebody tells you something, and you have a great idea, instead of making it your idea, you give it to someone else. It gives you a sense of going back and forth and giving. That was one of the big things that I got from them. And a lot of little techniques. They were always about the little things, [such as] mirroring.

In classes they had a checklist. I ended up teaching there too. You’d have to check things off from this little booklet. And each class you’d have to go: ‘did you do this exercise? Did you do this exercise?’ But by doing that, every single person had the same sort of base knowledge. Even today, Delaney or Dave and I kid around and say lets do ‘Pot of Glue.’ Inflatables, that was my favorite. Very simple little exercise where two people were onstage talking to each other. And as you’re talking, you’re inflating him: ‘You’re great. You’re super. You do great work. You’re really smart.’ And it’s like they’re being pumped up, pumped up and then say one thing bad and deflate, deflate. There was no purpose to the exercise. There’s no entertainment value to it, but you learn a little teeny thing like that and throw it into your improv.



J: And you actually physically inflate as you’re doing it?


B: Yeah. They did a lot of little things like that. …Every class you learn something.



J: So what were you three [Billy, Michael Delaney, and Dave Blumenfeld] doing with improv at that time? Was Linda Delaney improvising with you?


B: Linda was up here. And also another friend of ours Greg Madera moved up here with us as well. He has since moved down to Nashville, has a kid and all that stuff. We formed a group called ‘Lost Footage.’ That was our first New York improv troupe. We thought ‘we’re gonna be the best group ever. We’re gonna fuckin’ rock.’ ‘Lost Footage’ was where we met Bobby Curious a.k.a. Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Curious is drunk Indian Bob in the ‘Sunshine Gang.’ He plays the guitar and all that stuff.



J: Was he improvising?


B: Yeah, we met him at National Improv Theater, but he was our musician in a sense. We did some musical improv stuff. He basically gave music to all the scenes, but with guitar, not piano.



J: So were you guys performing at the National Improv Theater?


B: We started performing at the National Improv Theater, Friday nights, just like we’re doing here. They kept half the money, and we were supposed to get the other half of the money.



J: And that never happened?


B: They left town [laughs] …It was a small space. Honestly, it was nicer than this space [the UCBT]. It was nice and well put together, but it was smaller. And our houses were smaller. If we had 20 people, it was a good night.



J: So how long was it until the UCB came to New York?


B: There was a couple year gap between then and when the UCB came, and during that time we actually created our own theater space in the basement of the ‘Hans Akookoo [sp.?] Natural Remedy and Treatment Center.’ Dr. Ken Kubiachi loved our work. He was an acupuncturist and Chinese herbal medicine doctor, and at that time Delaney was very ill with his kidneys. And somebody had mentioned: ‘Go to Dr. Kubiachi.’

Eventually all of us went to him. He gave us awful Chinese teas with tweas [sp] and stuff in them. But he had a basement space. …He loved it. He loved improv. He thought it was great. He had a big giant space, and said if we put in some flooring and put in a few risers, we could do shows there. Friday nights. He wanted to teach classes there. He wanted to do all kinds of stuff there. He wanted to make it a performance/health center. And we would do our shows there.

If we had twelve people, [it would be a good night.] That’s where we came up with the rule if there were more people in the audience than on the stage we do the show, but if there’s less than five we don’t do the show. So we spent a lot of Friday nights just playing guitar and drinking beer.



J: Were you happy there?


B: Yeah, it was fun, but honestly by that time I don’t think improv was a career. It was just something I was doing on Friday nights. I personally came very close to moving to Vegas. I was offered a job doing events management stuff. …And it’s like do we go to Vegas, or…



J: Well, would they [Michael and Dave] have gone with you?


B: No. At that time I was married. It was between me and my wife if we were going to go out there. And I think we just hunkered down.

While we were there, I think the UCB came to town. I think the first workshop I had was with Matt Besser. I didn’t know who he was or what was going on. I think Dave and I went to the workshop with a bunch of other people who we knew from N.I.T., because not everyone at N.I.T. was a Scientologist. There were a lot of other people there.

We took the workshop and I remember going as we walked away, ‘who the fuck does this guy think he is? He’s telling us everything we’re doing is wrong? What is ‘a game?’ What is this [makes a cloverleaf pattern with his finger]?’ He spent all this time talking about the cloverleaf pattern.



J: Playing a game then getting away from it?


B: Yeah, but it stuck. Then I met Ian [Roberts]. Ian coached us personally, and that was really good. Then we saw them perform, and it was like ‘oh, wow.’ First, we had seen their sketch show, which we were like ‘ok, it’s a good sketch show.’ We were still like [defensively crosses arms]. Maybe that was just me, and not everybody else. Then we saw ASSSSCAT and I went ‘ohhhh, that’s what they’re talking about.’ And that’s when we met all of them.



J: Did that blow your mind? Was it better than any improv you had seen before?


B: Um, I wouldn’t say that, because there was some good stuff going on at N.I.T. But it was the kind of improv I wanted to play. I didn’t sit back and go ‘wow, I could never do that.’ I was like ‘yes. I want to do that.’ So it motivated me, instead of blew me away. And that’s what got me going like ‘yeah, lets do this’ and it really made me want to work with them. Because we knew their reputation. And at the time, we’d be hungering to learn how to do a proper Harold. The people who we had come in and teach us before didn’t know what they were doing. These guys knew what they were doing. So that’s what we really wanted out of them.



J: How was ASSSSCAT different from the impressive stuff you had seen at N.I.T.?


B: More laid back. More to the point. The big guns at N.I.T. wore all black, nice button down shirts, tucked in. It was like an off-broadway experience. They had won cabaret awards and stuff like that. So they were more adult. ASSSSCAT is for kids. It’s fun. It’s the kind of comedy that we liked. For instance, the main group at N.I.T. would do a form called ‘impressional styles.’ Jim Meskeman could do any impression. It was incredible, but his impressions were like James Mason, Sean Connery.

ASSSSCAT was totally different. It was kind of more of the humor that we got, what we liked, and how they got to it was quicker. It was just what we wanted. It was like this [snaps]. It was just really good.



J: How did you start getting involved with the UCB? Did they have a theater or performance space at the time?


B: At that time they were all over the place until they hooked up with this place called Solo Arts, which was on the 6th floor of a building in Chelsea. They did their show, then they started teaching workshops on the weekends. And that’s when we started meeting people, like Sean Conroy, Secunda, Daly, Terry Jinn, Leo. A lot of Chicago City Limits people heard about [the UCB], and they became involved. And National Improv Theater people became involved. So all of those people who were kind of tired of that kind of stuff said this is what we want and this is what we understand to be long-form. At N.I.T. it wasn’t long-form. It was mid-form. Their Harold was more of what we call a montage here. This was a true structure, an interesting thing to do.

It was just the four of them. And they split up the workshops. More people kept taking the classes. Groups started forming. A couple of the members of Lost Footage got together with a couple other people and we formed a group called Naked Apartment. From there we started doing ‘kind of’ Harolds.

We were kind of doing shows on our own. By that time we knew how to put up shows on our own. So UCB would do one set, we would do one set, Lost Footage would do a set, then Hammerheads would do a set. Then after that Lost Footage would turn into Naked Apartment. Then as Naked Apartment kind of started to dwindle and as Hammerheads started to dwindle that’s when the Swarm got together.

Amy wanted to try a new form, and I think it was Delaney and Secunda who put the group together. I just got a call. I was lucky enough to get a call.



J: So Delaney and Secunda put together the Swarm?


B: I think so. They would know that better than me. I know Amy had a form she wanted to work on, and I think Delaney and Secunda talked to her about it, or something along those lines. They got Katie and Joanne and me from Naked Apartment. Sean and Daly and Aaron Bergeron from the Hammerheads.I remember meeting at their apartment, and we did not well with the form. It was not a good form for us. It was a hip-hop style structure.



J: How was it hip-hop?


B: Have you ever heard Wu-Tang Clan? This song and this song start to merge together. Whatever this person was singing about would influence the other person, and it would go back and forth, then they would sing together, then go back to their song. And she wanted to do the same thing with scenes, but [makes a frown].



J: So it wasn’t explicitly hip-hop oriented?


B: No, we weren’t doing hip-hop. But Eugene Cordero was our mixer, I believe. This was before I even knew who Eugene was. Amy set it up at our first show where there was just somebody spinning tunes.



J: Is she really into hip-hop?


B: She was at the time. I’m sure she is now too. And that’s how the name Swarm came about. We were sitting at ‘Duke’s,’ ‘Duke’s Barbeque’ coming up with a name. We came up with 3 different names. El Sabor because that was the name of the hot sauce on the table at the time, The 5 Conundrums of Dr. Fang, or something like that, and the Swarm. The Swarm was a certain part of the form where we would have to yell out [slow-mo] ‘Let’s break it down!!!’ And two people would freeze and we would paint the picture really explicitly. Then we’d back out.

And Amy kept telling us in rehearsals ‘it’s like you’re Swarming. I want you to swarm more. Swarm all over the place. Like you’re bees.’ So that’s how it came about.



J: That’s interesting [laughing]. When you started taking classes with the UCB, did you know your classmates from before? And could you immediately tell they were very talented.


B: No, I didn’t know who Sean was. I didn’t know who Andy [Secunda] or Andy [Daly] were. I found out later that Secunda said his very first improv scene was with me. It’s like ‘I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have done it with you if I had done that.’



J: Was it a good scene?


B: Yeah. I remember it was a basketball scene. He was my manager, and I wanted to get paid per bounce of the ball, like $5 a bounce. It was a hilarious scene. It was a brilliant scene.



J: So he, Andy Secunda, must have progressed really quickly, if that was his first scene and then he was working with you guys shortly after.


B: Oh, he had been doing comedy long before that. He was writing and doing sketch and stuff like that. I’m sure he had done versions of improv, but not an improv scene, like getting a suggestion and starting a scene.



J: So, when did you start teaching at the UCB?


B: I was trying to think of that. I counted them out. I’ve taught 78. It’s been about 3 or 4 years. Maybe 5 years now. I don’t know. Before then I was coaching. I think Delaney starting teaching before I did. The first teacher they brought in after the UCB was Armando. He became the head teacher there. Then Kevin Mullaney came in and started teaching. Then New York people started teaching, because they wanted to get ‘the game’ established. I think Armando was big [on the game] when he came. When Kevin Mullaney came [he was very big on it]. Because he was very technical with that. They’re the guys who helped established teaching the game. Then of course as the UCB got their own show and got busier other people started teaching. I think Delaney was the next teacher, but I’m not sure. I can’t think of who else was teaching at the time. I’m not sure if Sean [Conroy] was teaching or not, because Sean was teaching at CCL too.J: So what is ‘the game’ to you?B: Game is structure. Game is the premise or what is funny about this. A game can be anything at any given time. I think the trick of knowing a game is not knowing it and just instinctively playing it. Because if you ‘know’ it, then you’re just playing it way too much. You know, that’s what ‘gamey’ is. To me, it’s important that you know what it is so you can get away from it then come back to it again.

I think all great comedy sketches have that [circles his finger] circle, the magical circle. Here’s the game. Now let’s get away from it. So when we get back to it …we ‘if that then what else’ and it gets bigger and bigger. It’s got a lot of different things. A lot of different phrases. I don’t think there’s one single sentence that explains it, because I think every scene can be different.



J: Do you think ‘the game’ has gotten a bad wrap? Or do you think that people appreciate it for what it is, that it doesn’t necessarily exclude relationship?


B: I was just thinking about that, because I hear a lot of people saying ‘no, we want to do relationship based scene work.’ And I’m just like ‘well of course there’s relationship in games.’ Do you have to mention that? That’s just silly. As I said before, if you play game so hard that that’s all there is is game, you don’t know who you are, where you are, it’s not going to be a good scene no matter what. You have to know that stuff. But if you only know who you are and where you are you have no reason to be in that scene. There’s no structure. No way to put it together. Nothing to bind it. Then you don’t have a scene either.

So, giving the game a bad wrap, I think that usually comes from people who don’t get game. …Eh, that’s just as insulting, and I don’t want to be insulting about it. I just think the term ‘slower scene playing’ sounds like an insult to me. I think there’s just as rewarding stuff in quick scene play as there is in slow scene play. You need to know the same amount of stuff in both of them.